Warhammer 40k Grey Knight Terminators

thorssoli

Sr Member
RPF PREMIUM MEMBER
I suppose I needed a new challenge. A while back I started tinkering with a maquette sculpt for a Grey Knight helmet.


These are pretty early pics, but unfortunately I didn't snap any pics of the finished maquette:


After a bit of tweaking, I decided it'd be better as the terminator style helmet and got to work on a full-sized version. I started by taking a reject casting from my Mk8 Space Marine helmet mold and hacking it apart. Then I added some 1/8" sintra to make it a bit taller and build the trademark plow shape at the front:


The forehead was cobbled together from a few more scraps of sintra:


Then I made the ends of the vents out of more sintra and took the ear caps from the original cast and re-attached them to the new helmet in a different orientation:


So here's how the prototype looked after the first day of tinkering:




To get a better idea of how it would look whenever I get around to making the armor to go with it, I set the whole thing into a large plywood tube I had sitting around from my ED-209 project:

Thus ended the first day of tinkering on this project.

The next day I started by building up the vent ducts on the top of the helmet. In order to keep from having to make 1-inch thick blocks of Bondo or whatnot, I started by adding filler blocks made of insulation foam:


I layered on a bit of Bondo to make a sandable surface over the vents and, because I really wasn't happy with the shape of the plow-face, I added more Bondo to the chin and nose area:


Here it is with a coat of primer:






A few days later I went back and did some more filler and sanding work to smooth out some of the smaller flaws:


Then I closed up the eye holes with some scraps of styrene:


Followed by a bit more filling and sanding:


And a coat of my standard lightish-red gloss prototype color:


Here's the prototype in all it's shiny pink glory:




Since the prototype was cobbled together from whatever garbage I had sitting around, I couldn't really expect it to hold up to much abuse or even look good on display for very long. In order to make a more durable version, it was time to make up a mold. I started by mounting the prototype to a piece of cardboard and packing some thickened silicone into all of the undercuts:


Then I built up silicone over the rest of the helmet:

Note the cardboard wall around the base of the helmet that forms a drip tray to keep silicone from drooling all over the table and onto the floor.

I didn't get any pics of the actual rotocasting process, but it's pretty straighforward. For those of you who aren't familiar with the process, you simply pour enough resin into the mold to coat the inside, then roll the mold around to make sure the whole thing is evenly coated. When the resin cures, you're left with a hollow shell. If you want extra strength, you can repeat this process until the cured resin forms an adequately thick shell. Here's my assistant Kate with the first cast copy of the helmet:


As usual, I made more than one:


I used a Dremel tool to cut out the eyes and clean up the neck hole. I also cut the trademark cross into the left side of the nose and a Forstner bit to drill an array of 1" holes into the left cheek. Then the whole thing was primed and sprayed with a gloss black basecoat:


Once the black had set up, the thing was a coat of Duplicolor Chrome paint:


Then I cut out a couple of pieces of blue-tinted 1/8" acrylic, heated them up until they were flexible and pushed them into the eye holes with a soft cloth to get an appropriately convex shape for the eye lenses. Once they cooled, I glued them in place and had Kate try on the helmet:


I tried it on too, of course:


And I saw that it was good:


Along the way I installed a couple of LEDs inside the forehead to illuminate the eyes:


Here's a shot of the helmet in its base silver color and better lighting:


Too shiny and clean, I know, so I installed some perforated metal sheeting in the cheek holes and started adding washes of black and brown acrylic paint. Here's a closeup of the resulting weathering:

Please excuse the housefly photobomb.

And a shot of two finished helmets:


More to come, stay tuned...
 
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It depends on how I tip the helmet, but I'll probably pad it up so I'll be looking through the vents. That way I won't have to worry about people looking in through the blue lit eye holes.
 
Pink paint, yes. The color isn't important at that stage, I just need something to make the prototype shiny. That way the mold lasts longer and I don't have to spend as much time doing prep work on the castings when they come out of the molds.

I use pink because it seems to aggravate people.
 
It's been way too long, so I've finally decided it was time to dust off this project and make the rest of the armor to go with these helmets.

I began by pulling my standard space marine chest out and adding some new chunks to it:





Then I blocked it up with some MDF and taped on some wax paper:


Then added some expanding foam:


After a few rounds of adding foam and carving it down with a saw, it was starting to shape up:


Here it is with a raw cast of the helmet for size testing:


With that shape roughed out, I got started on the shoulder pad by cutting out a basic outline:


Then I made a quick profile cutout and an outline for the bottom edge and glued them all together like so:


Placed against the chest, it looked okay size-wise:


So I went ahead and filled it with expanding foam:


After it had cured, I trimmed it down with a saw and some rasps:


While I was fine-tuning that shape, I decided to get started on a lower leg and a shield:


Because it seemed simple, I decided to focus on the shield first:


Here it is covered in expanding foam:


And again after shaving it down with a hand saw:


It's not small:


With the foam shape roughed out, the next step was to layer on a skin of Bondo auto body filler:


Once the skin was pretty close to smooth, I marked out a border along the perimeter:


Then I added on a strip of thick mounting tape:


After adding more Bondo around the outside edge, I peeled off the tape, leaving behind a raised border:


Here's how it looked after a bit more sanding and filling:


So after a bit more smoothing and polishing, it'll be time to pull a mold off of this bad boy:


Meanwhile, I'll keep making progress on the other parts.

Stay tuned...
 
Time for an update (finally).

I got the shield all shined up and ready to mold:


Then I built the mold:


The next day I set a minion to the task of removing the prototype from the mold:


Once we'd finished wet-sanding and polishing the mold, I laid up a strong, lightweight fiberglass copy:


I'll get back to that later.

In other news, the shoulder sculpt is very nearly ready to mold. I started by skinning over the foam shape with some Bondo:


After a couple of rounds of filling and sanding, it was just about the right shape:


It's still huge:


Next, I made up a quick contour gauge and added a couple more ridges:


So here's about how it looks right now:


It remains huge:


Here it is next to one of my reference images:


Almost there.

Finally, I've made some solid progress on the lower leg armor. I started with foam just like the shoulder:


Then piled on some expanding foam:


In order to make sure it looked beefy compared to the standard space marine, I had to see the two side by side:

I suppose it'll work.

Here's the shin and calf alongside the boot heel:


I roughed out the shape of the heel pretty quickly with a hand saw and rasps:


The shin took a bit more work, but I had it ready to skin in pretty short order:


Once it was mostly smooth, I started laying out the various recessed areas it needed:


I taped down some thick pieces of cardboard cut to match those shapes, then laid on another layer of Bondo. After removing the cardboard, I had nice, smooth recessed areas. I just had to clean up the edges a bit:


Still a bit more sanding and filling to go on those parts, but they're shaping up pretty well:


I'm starting to worry a little bit about the finished weight of the overall suit. It'll be bigger than my Space Marine armor by a little bit, but without the backpack, I think it'll still be a bit easier to get around in. Still, look at this shin:


That and the boot make this start to look like a really big thing:


Next up: I have to get a start on the force halberd.

Stay tuned...
 
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It's been a while since the last update. Time to fix that.

I added some recessed areas on the calf:




After adding a few smaller contours and ridges, here's how it looked in primer:


In no time at all, the shin, calf, and boot heel were all ready to mold:


The shoulder too:


With all of those parts ready to mold, it was time to start fiberglass work. We began with building up mold walls:


Then gelcoat was applied:


After laying up fiberglass over the first section, the clay wall was removed and the process was repeated on the next section:


Here's the completed molds for the lower leg:


Somewhere along the way we ran out of orange tooling gelcoat and had to shift to black. Here's the shoulder and boot molds in progress:


And here they are with the last of the fiberglass layup finished:


At long last, here's the four parts of the shoulder mold separated from the master:


And the first shoulder pull next to the chest sculpt and the shoulder master:


This assembly is just about 4'7" wide. So yeah, it's going to be Freakin' huge!
 
Beast indeed. I'm trying hard not to be overwhelmed by the size of some of the pieces. For another idea of the scale, this is my assistant Chuck:

She's only about 5'2" tall, so I'm reasonably convinced that she could fit inside the shoulder pauldron.

Tomorrow I'm finally going to get started sculpting out the thighs and what's left of the torso.

Stay tuned.
 
Not to worry. I'm on a mission.

Coming soon: the toe section of the very big boot:


I think it's about a US size 44, but I can't be sure.
 
i cracked up seeing this "lots of big words, lots of little words" :lol

37139770200_c30743e389_c.jpg
 
i cracked up seeing this

I do aim to please.

Both shoulders are out of the molds:


My sister stopped by the workshop, so I had her try on the shoes:


The toe is nearly done.

Since we were on a roll, I had my assistant Chuck try on all of the lower leg parts:


She's about 5'1" or so. That should give you a good idea of the scale of this beast.

In other news, the sculpting has begun for the thighs:


Stay tuned for more:
 
Started sculpting out the pelvis:


And the waist section:


The toe is just about ready to mold:


In other news, I got one of these:


Which I hacked in half and mounted here:


The chest sculpt still has a long ways to go:


But it's still shaping up to be huge:
 
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